FIRS generates N1.78tn in six months, targets N1.8tn VAT

The Federal Inland Revenue Service collected a total sum of N1.782tn in tax revenue between January and July this year.

The figure represents an increase in tax revenue of N224.14bn when compared to the N1.558tn collected in the same period in 2016.

The Executive Chairman, FIRS, Mr. Tunde Fowler, announced this on Tuesday, while defending the budget of the agency before the Senate Committee on Finance in Abuja.

He also projected raising the current N828bn annual Value Added Tax collection to N1.8tn this year, representing over 125 per cent increase.

The FIRS boss said the agency had also set tax revenue targets for 2017 based on the Federal Government’s 2016-2018 Medium Term Revenue Framework amounting to N4.89tn.

Fowler said the FIRS budget was focused on capacity to increase VAT and other non-oil revenues.

According to him, the performance of the 2017 budget will be driven by VAT collection.

“The service, in realisation of this responsibility and challenges of doing manual collection, has automated VAT collection for the critical sectors of the economy, notably telecommunications, airlines and financial institutions,” he stated.

Fowler explained that the deployment of the platforms was at no cost to the FIRS, while the consultants engaged would only be rewarded on incremental revenue generated.

The FIRS boss said the budget for oil revenue dropped by nine per cent over the 2016 figure due to low oil price.

On budget parameters, Fowler said the 2017 projected cost of collection of N153.44bn was higher than the 2016 approved estimate, which was N143.90bn.

He said the figure represented a cost of collection increase of 6.63 per cent on the overall projected non-oil revenue, including VAT, stamp duties and levies.

Fowler prayed the Senate to approve “the surplus budget of N848bn arising from an expected total revenue of N153.4bn over expenditure of N152.6bn.”

On the revenue projections performance in the first half of 2017, he stated that the analysis showed that the FIRS had recorded an increase of N224bn, representing an overall increase of 14 per cent when compared with the collection performance for the corresponding period in 2016.

“We have, therefore, achieved 72.93 per cent of our half-year target of N2.44tn for 2017, as against 74.2 per cent of N2.1tn for the corresponding period in 2016,” he said.

The FIRS boss put tax collection between January and June at N1,782,922,600,000, with variation of N224,140,900,000, giving 14 per cent increase in the same period in 2016.

Fowler said, “The chairman (of the Senate committee) may note that we attained this collection performance despite several challenges, as we have continued to vigorously pursue our strategies internally, while improving collaboration with relevant stakeholders to boost our collections.”